National c2001 (LFc2001) Assessment

A Product Quality Control and Assessment (PQCA) Plan was developed by the PQWT and accepted by the LANDFIRE (LF) Leadership Team and LF Executive Oversight Committee. The plan includes quality control procedures for production processes as well as a product quality assessment approach where applicable. For details of the assessment approach, please download and review the PQCA Plan currently posted for the Western U.S. Milestone.

In short, the LF products quantitatively assessed under the PQCA Plan are those that are modeled directly from geo-referenced field plots contained in the LF Reference Data Base (LFRDB). This includes the Existing Vegetation Type (EVT) and Environmental Site Potential (ESP) products for the Western U.S. Milestone (WUS). For the Eastern U.S. (EUS) and Alaska/Hawaii (AK/HI) Milestones, only the EVT layer is assessed, due to changes in ESP mapping methods. Canopy Fuels and Fire Behavior Fuel Model (FBFM) spatial products are also assessed under the PQCA plan for EUS and WUS, although with different methods than those used for EVT. Canopy Fuels and FBFM were not assessed in AK/HI.

Many of the product quality assessment results are presented by Super Zones, which are aggregations of individual LF mapping zones. Super Zones represent areas with large enough sample sizes to enable meaningful inferences about product quality, given the sampling design used to withhold field plots for product quality assessment. See the PQCA Plan for more detail on the holdout sample design and the use of super zones in the product quality assessment process.

For U.S. mapping zones, results are summarized in six reports as follows: